The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [62]
He took the shears to the dog’s ribs. They crunched through the bones as if they were twigs. Then he cut away at the animal’s innards. He did it roughly, quickly.
“Not taking my usual care, of course,” he said.
The heart came free, the size of a pear. Blotched, discoloured and feeble-looking. Pale liquid dripped from it. Christison frowned. He set the organ down beside the corpse, neatly sliced it with a single sweep of the knife, and spread it. It opened like a butterfly of flesh.
“Look at that,” he exclaimed as that same pale liquid flowed out from the exposed chambers. “Whatever this beast had in its veins, it was not blood. This is most puzzling.”
He glanced at Quire with narrowed eyes.
“You’re certain this is not some prank, Sergeant?”
“I am. I’ve come across a good deal that is puzzling of late, sir. Things I can’t rightly explain, and I don’t know that anyone can except by means I can’t bring myself to believe in.”
Christison raised a sharp eyebrow.
“And what do you mean by that, precisely?”
“I’ve had one or two folk mentioning the Devil to me lately,” Quire grunted.
“Ha! Come now… ah, I see you are serious. Look, Sergeant, you strike me—and sound, I must say—like a man under a good deal of strain. Perhaps some rest and recuperation…”
“I’d agree with you, were it not for the fact that some folk seem set on killing me. Not the moment for a nap, I think. There’s something I need to ask you, sir, in confidence. I need to find a man can testify to the involvement of certain… gentlemen… in the business of body snatching. Without a witness, my hands are tied. Can you tell me…”
Quire hesitated. He was asking a great deal of the professor now, he knew. Challenging his loyalty to his calling, and his colleagues.
“Can you tell me who has been buying corpses from the Resurrection Men of late? Who is most likely to be taking delivery?”
Christison scowled at him, and Quire’s heart sank. He had overstepped the mark.
“Sergeant Quire,” the professor said, “if you seriously expect any respected anatomist to publicly testify to his receipt of cadavers from disreputable sources, your sense has truly deserted you. It matters not that the trade is common knowledge. It is unspoken knowledge, and should it cease to be so, the damage to the reputation of all those concerned—to the whole business of the teaching of medicine in this city—would likely be irreparable.”
“Yet there have been murders committed,” Quire said bluntly. “There’s those as are wishing I was numbered amongst the victims. I have to tell you, at this moment I care little for the protection of reputations, sir.”
“Well said, I suppose,” Christison grunted, though he did not sound convinced. “But really, Sergeant, you don’t need me to tell you where to look, surely? I thought you a perceptive man. One capable of deductive reasoning easily sufficient to this task.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“It is in the nature of any trade that goods flow as the demand for them dictates, is it not? I think it was one of the recent great minds of this very city, Adam Smith, who shed light on such matters, but I suppose you find little time for recreational reading. Let me tell you this, then, and this alone: there is one dissection table in particular that is never short of a cadaver.
“Dr. Knox has five hundred students subscribed this year. More than all the other private tutors combined, I believe. No teacher of anatomy has ever drawn so many, and it is the steady procession of the dead passing through his school that brings them. Even our own students buy their way into his theatre, since the university cannot match his certainty of supply.”
“Robert Knox,” Quire murmured.
“You know him?”
“No. Only in… no, not really. I know the name, and something of the reputation.”
Not the whole truth, but as much of it as Quire wished to share.
“Well, I’d not put too much weight on reputations, Sergeant. They’re flimsy things that conceal more than they reveal. But remember: you did not have his name from me.”
“No, sir,” Quire